boston

As students around the world return to school, ccLearn blogs about the evolving education landscape, ongoing projects to improve educational resources, education technology, and the future of education. Browse the “Back to School” tag for more posts in this series.

One aspect of open courseware* is its draw for potential students who are deciding where to spend their parents’ or their own hard-earned dollars in obtaining a higher education. The fact is unsurprising, as we saw in 2007, with MIT OCW reporting that “One in four current MIT students who knew of OCW prior to choosing MIT [indicated] the site was a significant influence on their school choice.”

However, beyond free advertising for its school, certain open courseware programs have begun to evolve past the open licensing status of their courses. As the global learning commons of OCW is growing, so are the local learning contexts of open courseware, as more colleges realize the benefit of working with high schools in their areas to prepare, and perhaps to propel, their youth into higher education.

Last month, the University of Massachusetts Boston was awarded a $60,000 grant by the Boston Foundation, with the specific aim of better preparing Boston public high school students for college level courses. The grant will fund workshops for teachers, training them on how to use open courseware to educate their students at gradually accelerated levels. Similar to MIT OCW’s Highlights for High School initiative, these workshops promote high school teacher and student use of open educational resources.

However, I imagine it also going one step further. In providing training for teachers on the use of open educational resources (OER), teachers will not be simply accessing OCW resources on the web. They will learn how to use OER according to its license status, and realize that the commons of open educational resources is vast and global, open to be adapted, derived, and remixed with other OER on the Internet. The Boston grant would enable teachers to see open courseware as part of a larger world of open materials and communities, rather than as simply an institution.

We hope that many other universities and colleges offering OCW will follow this same trend, localizing their university’s offerings at the same time that they are globalizing them via CC licenses. Especially, initiatives like Academic Earth, a site that pools a number of OCW in high definition video, could really run with this idea of contextualization for teachers and students, educating them on the new communities that are opened to them via something as simple as the licensing status of a resource.

*Traditionally, open courseware are university or college courses that are freely accessible online, usually via an open license (the most commonly used license for OCW is CC BY-NC-SA), consisting of lectures and other multimedia, core content, supplemental materials, or tools to aid learning. Nowadays, open courseware sans an open license that allows derivatives, though free, are not considered open, as the ability to adapt the work to global and local contexts via translations and cultural references has become integral to the spirit of OCW.

This coming weekend (March 21-22) in Cambridge, Massachusetts the Free Software Foundation is holding its annual meeting, dubbed the Libre Planet Conference. Many of CC’s best friends and supporters will be there, as will CC staff Asheesh Laroia and I. If you aren’t familiar with the significance of the free software movement to free culture, start by checking out the links on our post celebrating the former’s 25th birthday, or better yet come to Libre Planet. The conference will feature the hottest issues in software freedom, some of which include a free culture component.

Another important conference is coming to the eastern part of North America — the Libre Graphics Meeting, May 6-9 in Montreal. Developers of the most important free software graphics applications will be represented. These applications are heavily used by contributors to free culture sites such as Wikimedia Commons and many of the developers engage in cutting edge free cultural productions themselves, e.g., Blender. CC staff have attended in years past and Jon Phillips is helping put together this one.

As noted on the CC Labs blog, video and audio from the December CC Technology Summit is now available:

In December we held our second CC Technology Summit at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I think the day provided a great perspective on what we’re doing at CC and how others are building a real community around it. If you weren’t able to attend, we now have audio and video available. And if you missed the first one, the video for that is available as well.

We’re holding the second Creative Commons Technology Summit tomorrow in Cambridge, MA. The program is online and I’m quite excited about the lineup. We still have some space available so if you’re in the area and would like to attend, drop by the Stata Center at MIT tomorrow morning and register on site. The cost is $75 ($50 for CC Network members) or $40 for students ($20 for CC Network members).

If you can’t make the event, fear not; Frank will be pseudo-live-blogging the event over on the CC Labs blog and we’ll have video available afterwards.

Just a quick reminder that registration is still open for the December Technology Summit taking place in Cambridge, MA. The program looks like a great set of presentations about technology that touches CC: RDFa, digital copyright registries, embedded metadata and more.

Registration is available online and we’ve added student rates at about half the normal rate: $40 or $25 for students who are also CC Network members (plus the option to buy both at the same time). Hope to see you there!

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For those of you interested in the tech side of Creative Commons, MIT’s CSAIL is hosting CC’s second Tech Summit from 9-4:30. The first Tech Summit, held at Google this past summer, was a complete success; those archived presentations are here.

We hope you will join us in celebrating Creative Commons’ sixth successful year and the culmination of our 2008 Annual Fundraising Campaign, “Build the Commons.” This event is open to the public, but because we’re closing in on the end of our campaign, we encourage you to bring your check books (or cash rather) and help sustain CC by donating at the door!

Space is limited. Please RSVP by December 1st to Melissa Reeder, Development Manager, at melissa@creativecommons.org.

Two months ago we announced the second CC Technology Summit, taking place December 12, 2008 in Cambridge, MA at MIT. The response to the call for presentations was good, and the initial program is now available. I’m excited about the mix of topics we have on the program. The day will include reports from our community, including a presentation on copyright registry interoperability by Safe Creative and Registered Commons and a report from the Queensland Treasury on their use of licensing and metadata. We’ll also have presentations from within CC — a report on open source knowledge management from Science Commons and an update on what’s next for RDFa.

Registration is also now open for the event. While the first Technology Summit was free thanks to Google’s generous support, we do have costs associated with the December Technology Summit. To offset those costs, there is a registration fee: $50 for CC Network members or $75 for non-members. If you’d like to sign up for CC Network membership at the same time as you register, we’ve enabled that as well (no discount, though; $100 total).

It’s been a busy year at CC and I’m looking forward to the Technology Summit as an opportunity to review what we’ve done and look ahead to 2009.

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Following the success of our first technology summit in June we knew we would do another one soon. Today we’re announcing the next, which will be held in Cambridge, MA on December 12. We’re also changing the format slightly, trying to add more talks and reduce the number of panels. To support that we’re also announcing a Call for Presentations.

The Technology Summits are about connecting the larger developer and technical community that’s sprung up around Creative Commons licenses and technology, so we want to provide a venue where people doing interesting work can share it. We’ve identified some areas we think are interesting and ripe for exploration but those are mostly just a guideline. The summit will once again be a single-day event, so we have about five 45-minute slots available. Proposals/abstracts are due October 24, so get to it! Full details are available in the wiki.